CLEVELAND – LeBron James lay flat on his back in the middle of the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room late Friday night, a trainer leaning over him, pushing his left leg over his right. He had emptied himself out over the past three hours, so much that he needed to be stretched to keep from cramping.Why so much, so far ahead of their next game, which was not or another three days?
"Man, I got to start getting ready right now, bro," James said.
In the NBA, they call nights like Friday for the Cavaliers a "1-2-3 Cancun Game." As in, that's what players yell when they break the huddle, preoccupied with the offseason because hope has been extinguished. They had given everything in Game 3 and came up short, in wrenching fashion, against the Golden State Warriors, an all-time great opponent. The Cavs faced the grimmest of odds. Their opponents were motivated by a cocktail of history and revenge.
"You've seen a lot of teams, sometimes it's easier just to let the season be over," guard Kyle Korver said. "That's not this team."
The postgame strain of James revealed the central factor in the Cavaliers' stunning, season-prolonging, 137-116 victory over the Warriors. The Cavaliers won because James punched up another triple-double, because Kyrie Irving verged on the mystical in scoring 40 points and because they drained 24 three-pointers. But the underlying causes were simpler: pride and belief, both earned through championship experience.
"Part of it is pride, but part of it is, we believe we can win games," Cavaliers veteran Richard Jefferson said. "If you can beat a team by 20 and dominate them from start to finish, you can't win two or three games? We proved it last year: We were down 3-1, but we blew them out by 30 here. We can beat them three times in a row. It's going to be difficult."
The Cavaliers did not appear to be a team poised for a stirring last stand. Last year, after the Cavaliers lost Game 4 to fall behind three games to one, James turned logistics into a rallying cry. "We have to go back to Cleveland, anyway," he kept saying. No such sentiment applied Friday. James' post-practice news conference Thursday, on the eve of Game 4, resembled an exit interview.
But in the day before Game 4, the Cavaliers regrouped. They had played better in each game, and they told one another to just keep improving, keep playing better. James repeated a message to teammates: "Live in the moment." At shoot-around Friday morning, Coach Tyronn Lue saw no hanging heads or sad expressions. "Guys are into it," he thought. He knew the Cavaliers would be OK. When J.R. Smith walked into the locker room, he noted a surprising mellowness. "I kind of liked the aura," he said.
